Unsettling High-Voltage Insanity

The antics of an unstable person with access to high voltage are both mesmerizing and terrifying.

Take a moment and prepare yourself. The videos you're about to see can be very unsettling. Frankly, I'm not even sure I should be sharing this individual's antics with the public, but, hey, maybe people can live vicariously through him and not hurt themselves.

Meet Photonicinduction (real name unknown). This crazy person does experiments with high voltage and with reckless abandon. Though a million things may go through your head as you watch some of these videos, if you're like me, you'll keep coming back to this one.

"He's going to do that... on carpet?"

You'll have to click the links in the following image captions to see the videos, because embedding has been disabled.

Yes, that is a red-hot wrench... on a carpeted floor.
Click here to see this specific experiment.

In this video, our intrepid engineer gathers up miscellaneous bits of metal and passes more juice through them than any sane person would. He's testing out a new fuse rated at 5,000 amps (or something to that effect). Frankly, I sat mesmerized through the entire video without picking up on his goal, whatever it was -- aside from destruction.

A screwdriver handle failing to stop a 100,000-volt arc.Click here for the video.

Of course, safety is always on his mind. In this video, he demonstrates a few different results of bringing screwdrivers into contact with his toys. The screwdriver in the image above actually performed admirably. It held back the danger until he pushed beyond 100,000 volts.

At this point, you're probably trying to decide if you want to see more. You do. You know it, and I know it. Just click to the next page, and get it over with.

I used to own an early large screen Zenith color TV with a mechanically operated rotary tuner. As the tuner became old it was possible to get between notches so the scanning coils were unmodulated. This meant the full 30kV was driving the electron beam to a single spot, producing some rather interesting and potentially dangerous radiation. If this guy has the electron gun on and has locked out the scanning he will have most likely given himself a nice dose of X-rays at the voltage he is using.

Back in the early '60s when CRTs were first married to thick glass faces many older units (mostly TV sets) were junked. At the time I was in 6th and 7th grade in Santa Fe, NM and one of our after-school entertainments was to go to the city dump and drag out old TB sets, position them appropriately in the nearby arroyo, and 'execute' them with our British .303 Enfields. These units lacked bonded safety glass and we removed the secondary safety glass from the front of the cabinets. The results were spectacular - the entire circuit assembly would be ejected from the back of the set - tubes, capacitors, resistors, sheet metal, et al. with a most satisfying blast. This fun was short lived, as the dump attendant, who lived in an old city bus bearing the legend 'Santa Fe is a Nice Place to Live' learned that the TV sets, despite their age, still have some value, and saved them under his old bus. However, he often took an afternoon nap around the time school let out and we learned to drag the units (quietly) from under this bus and lined them up for dispatch - 7 to 8 .303 Enfields going off at once, with the accompanying tube implosions, were usually enough to wake him up, and he would chase us down the arroyo with his 10 gauge shotgun charged with salt shells - these stung like the devil and the welts were hard to explain to our mothers - but the results were worth the risk and we continued our depredations for several months until the dump attendant summoned the city police to help him out - that was the end of our TB implosion experiments.

We didn't have access to the high voltage/current sources of the 'Insanity' person, but it was a good way for us, at the tender age of 10-12, to develop a respect for the dangers of old equipment and those who still valued it.